Disjunction

In comments on my post about The Book of Genesis the other day, there was some surprisingly interesting conversation* about what The Bible is and how it got that way--essentially, about how it's an awkwardly compiled collection of a bunch of regional myths that we only pretend has any kind of a "plot."

*Surprising not because I didn't expect y'all to be interesting, but because I didn't expect anyone to be interested.

It's a fascinating conversation to have, and half of me wants to run off and look into the history of how what we think of as "The" Bible solidified, but the other half of me thinks that this is, well, only half of the conversation. In what follows please understand that I'm not criticizing anyone who took part in that conversation--quite the contrary!--merely trying to explain what I'm interested in. I'm certainly not comparing anyone to Kingsley Amis.

While I'm (again I vigorously emphasize) not comparing anyone to him, I mention him because I'm indirectly reminded of the bit in his abysmal survey of science fiction, New Maps of Hell, when he decries the state of The Novel in SF as he sees it at the end of the 50s:

An idea that will comfortably fill out a few thousand words will not do for a novel, or rather there will be an attempt to make it do by various kinds of padding. This can happen even when idea is not primary, as in the later episodes of [Pohl and Kornbluth's] The Space Merchants and in Pohl's single novel, Slave Ship, in which what are virtually two short stories, one about animal communication, the other about undersea warfare between 40,000-ton submarines, and both good, are bundled into one frame along with a lot of adventure stuff about a lukewarm war between the United States and the adherents of a new Oriental [sic, sic, a thousand times sic] religion. Similarly, James Blish's A Case of Conscience breaks apart in the middle, and one notes that the first and far superior half, dealing with a literally satanic utopia, was published earlier as a long story complete in itself. The economics of science-fiction writing are obviously important here, demanding as they do a huge output in a medium that calls for a sustained flow of novelties; it is no wonder if some of these get inflated to book-length. One hopes that as the audience for science fiction increases, and with it the author's remunerations, there will be less of this forced expansion, but I cannot foresee any change in the basic fact that this is a short-story or at any rate a long-story mode, with hundreds of successes in these forms as against a bare couple of dozen in the novel.

What Amis is describing is what SF people call "fix-ups," and I had a great line about how he doesn't use the word because he doesn't know a single thing about the field he's describing, but Wikipedia tells me that the term supposedly didn't become common until Peter Nicholls used it in 1979, and although I don't quite buy that, it kind of takes the wind out of the sails of my abuse.

Anyway, though Amis is wrong about almost everything else here (my delight in his prediction at the end being utterly wrong wrong wrong is the only reason I've ever found to be happy about the general decline of the short story in SF, and the concomitant rise of the intensely massive novel--which of course is frequently part of a trilogy or septalogy or Ongoing Cycle--but anyway, enough digressions), he is essentially correct in attributing the (real when he wrote) ubiquity of the fix-up primarily to economic concerns. However, his idea that these extensions or compilations are merely "padding," or that the disjunctions created by the process can only ever be "flaws," is silly, and misses out on one of the most beautiful things that happens in classic SF. Because the disjunction is key, regardless of prosaic questions of why it's there.

I haven't (yet) read the Pohl novels he discusses, but I have read the Blish, and it is one of the best novels I have ever read. I find absurd the suggestion that Blish is not a good enough writer to extend a novella into a full-length novel without having it "break apart in the middle."

A Case of Conscience is a very peculiar book, and is the first of a very peculiar set of works that Blish insisted on calling a "trilogy"--which together he referred to as After Such Knowledge. The second book in the trilogy is his novel Doctor Mirabilis, an immaculately researched novelization of the life of Roger Bacon (which I recently attempted and will eventually re-attempt to read), while the "third book" is two fantasy novels, Black Easter and The Day After Judgment. Conscience is the only one of these books I've read as yet, but surely when faced with an author who insists that a novella-turned-novel, a biographical study, and two-novels-considered-as-one, none of which is directly related to the others (and all of which are even in different, though frequently linked, genres), form a "trilogy," we can safely say that this is an author who is interested in disjunctions.

Conscience does indeed "break apart in the middle"--the first half concerns a Jesuit priest who is part of a research mission on another planet, studying the intelligent aliens who live there, at first delighted with them, eventually deciding that they are the work of Satan. The second half concerns a member of the alien race, transported to Earth as an egg and hatched here, who through a series of bizarre, occasionally comic events, becomes a media celebrity along the lines of a Howard Beale, only more, I guess you could say, successful. The halves share characters, to be sure, and the Jesuit's story is a through-line that leads the book to its horrific, inconclusive ending, but the feel and focus of the two halves are completely different, enough so to make the reader quite uncomfortable.

This I think is Amis's problem, for it is abundantly clear that there is nothing he hates more than to be made uncomfortable. A Case of Conscience, as indicated by the name of the trilogy of which it is a part, and like much of the best SF, is to me about the problems caused by accumulating knowledge, and particularly about the problems caused by our inability to be sure if our knowledge is "true," is objective (or, to look at it another way, the problems caused by our insistence on believing, on subjective faith alone, that our knowledge is objective). To examine this concept in the falsely objective medium of the (heavily and coherently plotted) standard novel would be ineffective at best, and, worse, an inexcusably disingenuous bit of hypocrisy. And so Blish does not give us a standard, plotty novel, he gives us this disjunctive work, whose "break apart in the middle" is but one of many cues telling us that organizing our knowledge into the appearance of objective truth doesn't work.

I didn't intend for this post to be an analysis of A Case of Conscience. It was supposed to be an explanation of my attitude that, faced with a perplexing text, such as a James Blish novel or a book of The Bible, it can be fascinating and useful to examine the real-world reasons--historical, economic, whatever--that contributed to its being so perplexing, but what I tend to be more interested in is how the reader, faced with this text right now, deals with their perplexity.

Coming back to The Bible, millions and millions and millions of people care deeply about what it has to say, and I imagine only a small proportion of them care (or know) that the reason it says what it says the way it says it has this and that historical explanation--and even of those who do care (or know), only a small proportion stops there. These words mean something to people here and now, and while examining the history of The Bible is as genuinely fascinating as examining any other sedimentary deposits,* for me, it's not the primary interest.

*And I'm not being remotely sarcastic, no matter how much the thick layer of apparent sarcasm the internet lays over everything may make it seem like I am. And oh, how I wish that that disclaimer weren't itself so very ironic in the context of this post. Just trust me, I'm being sincere.

A women's "Bartleby"

Writing the other day about We Who Are About To..., and quoting Russ on "Bartleby, the Scrivener" as I did, made me connect those two stories in a way I hadn't before.

In What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici says, of "Bartleby" and of other works he finds cover similar ground:

In all these cases doing something other people seem to have no difficulty in doing becomes an intolerable imposition, not because it is fiendishly difficult but because it is so boring. And what makes a thing boring? That it is meaningless, and that therefore spending time on it feels as though it were robbing one of a portion of one's life.

(Thank you Richard for supplying the quote, since I had to return the book to the library; while I'm at it, thanks also to Richard for introducing me to exactly 1/2 of the writers I mention in this post [the two -icis].)

Obviously there is more to Bartleby's refusal than just this, more than just "boredom" (though boredom is by no means insignificant!) as Josipovici is surely well aware (he limits himself here to what is directly relevant for his study), but what he describes is still a deeply, explicitly political act, even if the mysterious motive behind it may not always be itself political. The phrase "robbing one of a portion of one's life," too, strikes me as being exactly the kind of stakes we're talking about here (I might even go so far as to remove "a portion of").

Not only that, but that phrasing, "something other people seem to have no difficulty in doing," puts me in mind of the experience many women report of the struggles involved in being a woman in our society--hence phrases such as "the problem that has no name." In large part this idea that other women "seem to have no difficulty" being the objects patriarchal/capitalist society demands them to be is an illusion created by the systematic destruction of women's social life, but internalized acculturation runs deep, and it is not entirely an illusion.

There's a passage in Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch in which she states one of her central theses, which is

that the body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers: the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance, as the female body has been appropriated by the state and men and forced to function as a means for the reproduction and accumulation of labor.

Now that I've given all this background and quoted these quotes, I'm starting to feel that my point is pretty much self-evident, and I have very little left to say on the subject. My observation is only this: We Who Are About To..., being a story of a woman who refuses at all costs to have babies for reasons that are not her own, is very similar thematically to "Bartleby," the story of a man who refuses at all costs to do work for reasons that are not his own. In both cases the refuser instantly becomes utterly incomprehensible to the other characters in her or his story--not to mention the majority of critics who will write about the stories!

Without realizing it, I wrote about all this when I first approached Russ's novel here:

I have seen several writers say that We Who Are About To... is about how to die, and how to live, and this is true--very true. But it is just as much about the right to say no--not just in terms of sex, or reproduction, but to anything and everything that you want to say no to, to everything that needs saying no to--or even to things that you just don't feel like saying "yes" to right now, for no good reason. It's about the right to not agree, to walk away from your society, and your culture, and your existence--and about the impossibility of exercising that right even at the most extreme remove imaginable from all these things.

All that remains for me to say is that where Bartleby chooses what to do with his life, Russ's narrator chooses what to do with her life in her body; so it is that Melville's story is largely nonviolent and ends with the one character's death alone, where Russ's is constantly, increasingly violent, and if it cannot end with the uncomprehending other characters, for whom nothing seems to be an "intolerable imposition," allowing the narrator to live in that body as she must, it can only end with the deaths of every single one of them.

Lying at the core

Just wait til you realize how clever that post title is!!

Joanna Russ, in her indispensable How to Suppress Women's Writing, has a tangent (and as always with Russ's tangents, it's so much more than just that) about Herman Melville and the silly things that can happen when critics fail--whether deliberately or by way of academic and/or privileged obtuseness--to consider social context:

I have read several pieces of criticism about "Bartleby" and although one of them compared Melville's position to Carlyle's Eternal No, not one of them began, "Did you ever work on an assembly line for ten years?" (Or in Woolworth's for six months or typing address labels for as little as one summer?) These questions are very much to the point... But then I worked as a secretary for three years and typed address labels for a mere six weeks--and that six weeks was enough to reveal Bartleby's situation to me as twenty years of reading literary criticism could not. (In a recent collection of Melville's stories, Harold Beaver sums up his remarks on "Bartleby" as follows: "Bartleby can never be wholly interpreted as either . . . Christ-figure, artist, or ascetic saint, nor is the story exhausted by such interpretations. At its root lies a theme more compelling than both: of the doppelganger . . . the figure of death . . . behind the green screen" of life. The actual nature of Bartleby's work--its isolation, its rote nature, its hideous boredom--and the social situation of employer-employee, as well as Bartleby's sitdown strike and the sentimental liberalism of his employer, are never mentioned.)

It was with considerable enjoyment that I recalled that passage while reading Adam J. Frisch's utterly pointless essay, "Language Fragmentation in Recent Science-Fiction Novels," in the utterly pointless book The Intersection of Science Fiction and Philosophy, edited by Robert E. Myers. Here's how Frisch begins his second paragraph:

Lying at the core of Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To... is an examination of language and meaning.

Oh, how I hope Russ happened upon this essay; I imagine she would have very much enjoyed savaging it. (Hint: if you're talking about what "lies at the core" of that novel, and you don't talk about patriarchy, capitalism, or at least the dark side of technological progress, you've pretty much missed the point.)

Frisch follows up his, shall we say, startling intro by giving a quick summary of the events of the book: "small group of travelers accidentally marooned on an isolated planet," violence, yadda. He makes me cringe again by saying that the "unnamed narrator becomes more and more disenchanted with her fellow travelers," because a) she starts out pretty much as disenchanted as you can be, and, more important, b) she has reasons for being so disenchanted, which aren't mentioned here*; but OK, maybe Frisch is gonna get around to it, now that the summary's taken care of.

*And also c) Frisch doesn't seem to realize that "fellow travelers" is an inappropriately meaningful phrase for his purposes here, especially since the novel deals heavily in Communism, dissent, and the totalitarian quashing of dissent.

He soon makes me a bit more nervous by quoting a passage in which the narrator quotes Emily Dickinson ("I'm Nobody, who are you? Are you Nobody, too?") without recognizing that it is a Dickinson quote, even though I'm fairly certain she doesn't have a more famous line. (In How to Suppress Women's Writing, incidentally, Russ spends quite a lot of pages talking about how the reality of a continuity of women's writing--of woman writers influencing one another and communicating with one another--has been systematically hidden, so that writers like, say, Emily Dickinson appear to have come out of nowhere and to have led nowhere; but I'm not sure why I'm bringing that up right now.) He then goes ahead and says this:

But the narrator's companions are incapable of change because they are incapable of listening. They have been nurtured in a culture that is almost devoid of the ability to discriminate sounds. The narrator finds their music mere noise that "goes deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle for half an hour and then it goes doodle just once, and you could die with excitement." Thus, when the males in the group, in an assumption of atavistic roles, decide the women must bear children immediately to insure "survival," she feels threatened and attempts to flee.

Let me take a deep breath and take this slowly. First of all, the narrator's "companions" (poor choice of word, there!) are most certainly not "incapable of listening"; they are, rather, very capable of listening to themselves, one another, and the dominant culture from which they came and of which they are desperate to think of themselves as still a part; they will listen to anyone and anything who does not stand against all of this--in the context of the novel, anyone and anything who is not the narrator (and even there, it doesn't apply to music--at least not the same way--as they do listen to her sing). Second, and here is where Frisch throws all credibility away by being utterly wrong about something that's not a matter of interpretation, the "deedle doodle" quote is dialogue spoken by a small girl--one of the other survivors--describing the serial music she loves and wants to compose, emphatically not the narrator dismissing popular music. This is not presented ambiguously in the text. It is impossible to mistake this even at the briefest of glances at the page: it is immediately preceded in this first person narration with "Then she added," and is immediately followed by "'Uh huh,' I said." (Also, distinguishing "doodle" from "deedle" and then dying with excitement is obviously not something that one does if one is "almost devoid of the ability to discriminate sounds.")

And then the paragraph takes what is to me a completely incomprehensible turn. If you can explain that "thus" to me, if you can explain how what comes after it follows from what comes before it, please, please do. Because for god's sake, the narrator doesn't "feel threatened and try to flee" because these people who want to force her to have a baby can't discriminate sounds; she feels threatened and tries to flee because she is in imminent danger of rape and forced pregnancy. Another way of saying this is that, no, the narrator does not feel threatened, she very concretely is threatened.

Clearly, Mr. Frisch, you've never typed address labels for six months, if you know what I mean. Nor have you ever, ahem, listened to anyone who has, even when one has been trying to tell you about it for 118 pages.

By now it's pretty clear that Frisch is never going to get around to mentioning what this story is about. Oh, but wait! Do I see the word "patriarchy" comin' round the bend?

Throughout the novel, the narrator is desperate to communicate [True! I wonder why? -E]. When her fellow survivors cannot or will not listen, she turns to her imagined future listener, the reader:

"Speaking" comes from a different place than "breathing." You must understand this. Those marks, "-", indicate speech. Communication. You must listen. You must understand that the patriarchy is coming back, has returned (in fact) in two days. By no design.

Although the narrator at first attributes her desire to communicate to the return of "the patriarchy" (that is, to the group's rapid reversion to male dominance), her repetition of the phrase "I must" suggests that the need for communication may arise from each individual's perception of death's inevitability. "I must speak" becomes "I must die."

[Moment of silence.]

OK, so just on a functional level: "at first" she mentions the patriarchy, then she repeats "I must"? In the passage I read, she repeats "you must," not "I must", and then, after the second repetition, she brings up the patriarchy. Hey, it's almost as if she wanted to really emphasize that, listen up, this mention of the patriarchy is really important, so don't try to dismiss it with scare quotes and that very dudely "Oh don't worry, she said patriarchy but really what she's talking about is Eternal Existential Verities for Men" nonsense.

Yes. One of the many things this book is about is death, the inevitability of death, the necessity of death, and how to go about dying. (It's not exactly hidden; the well-known completion of the title phrase is the word die, and "About to die" are the first three words of the novel; the third sentence is "We're all going to die.") However, it is about death in context, in the specific context of patriarchal, progress-oriented society, which denies, defies, mystifies, and fetishizes death; the context we pretty much all have to live and die in. (Also, how the fuck do you get from "repeating 'I must'" to "see, she's really talking about death here"? Again, when the book's title and opening words form the clause "We who are about to die," you don't have to go looking for cryptic clues and acrostics to figure out that death is on this book's mind.)

Similarly, yes, by god, We Who Are About To... is in large part about the difficulties of communication. But to talk about this like it's an end in itself is absurd. Like, oh, OK, it's a book about how it's hard to talk to people; no shit, now what? Why is communication a problem? What is the narrator so desperate to communicate? If you read this book and then feel the need to put quotation marks around "the patriarchy," you're not going to get very far in answering that question. In terms of Frisch's analysis, you'd think Russ would have been better off printing a book full of a random assortment of words in no particular order; that would have been the meaningless, apolitical representation of "language fragmentation" he's so desperate to shape the novel into.

More on science fiction, from one of many possible thoughts on Frankenstein

One of the many fascinating things about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein is that it is (among other things) a woman's rejection, not of Romanticism in its entirety, but of the male-based subjectivity that is so central to the Romanticism of her contemporaries. By attacking the whole notion of the individual (assumed male) genius while leaving intact the awe of nature, the skepticism about science and rationalism, the intensity of emotion, Shelley creates something remarkably different from--and to me, both more interesting and more what you might call morally sound than--what we normally expect of a Romantic work.*

*Analysis of Frankenstein in and of itself isn't what I'm primarily interested in here, so I'm not going into the ways in which she does this, but treating it as a given. If you want further analysis of this, I would imagine that there are plenty of published works as well as high school and college term papers about it.

It's especially interesting (to me) to think about what this means in terms of Frankenstein's place as one of the founding texts of science fiction (and some would, not without justification, leave off "one of" and italicize "the").

While it would take almost 150 years for any significant number of SF writers to catch up to Shelley's distrust of the nobility of science, not to mention her woman's perspective (though on both terms there were always exceptions), the rejection of heroic subjectivity is, to my mind, central to SF, despite any appearance to the contrary created by the plethora of individual heroes in the history of the genre. These heroes are, almost without exception,* not so much characters--individuals--as stand-ins for what many (including me in my last SF post) call "the idea as hero." Indeed, it would be very difficult to have a literature where the idea is itself the hero without the rejection of Romantic subjectivity.

*At least in SF of the "classic," pre-1960s era; after about the mid-60s the story of SF gets way more complicated, sometimes for the good, sometimes not.

It doesn't stop there--the SFnal concept of "the sense of wonder," for one, though it is superficially very similar to the traditional Romantic awe in the face of nature, is in fact almost completely different in both content and impact, in a way that is difficult to explain if we don't take Shelley's rejection as foundational. There is much more that could be said about this, and about other aspects of SF that are hugely informed by her rejection, but this post is getting way longer than I meant it to be and I'm not finished yet.

One of the most interesting (again, to me) aspects of this is that Shelley's rejection comes largely out of her perspective as a woman--a perspective that is noticeably absent from almost--but not quite--all pre-1960s SF, and still absent from a majority of the mainstream of the SF of the 1960s and later. The genre is notoriously masculine--even, all too frequently, macho. But the fact that a woman's perspective is so foundational to the genre carries through strongly.

Towards the end of Joanna Russ's frustratingly short essay, "On the Fascination of Horror Stories, Including Lovecraft's" (as collected in the indispensable To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction), Russ describes a fan party she attended, where the conversation turned to favorite horror stories, and then to the implications of the appeal of horror and SF:

[O]ne very bright young woman described her adolescent reading of SF as a genuinely subversive force in her life, a real alternative to the fundamentalist community into which she had been born. This alternative had nothing to do with the cardboard heroes and heroines or the imperial American/engineering values which she had skipped right over. What got to her were the alien landscapes and the alien creatures. We scholars perhaps tend to forget how much subversive potential both SF and fantasy have, even at their crudest.

Unfortunately, as with so many of the countless fascinating points she raises in this uncharacteristically skimpy essay, she leaves it there. But the point is made, and taken--and recognized. I have seen numerous accounts of women saying similar things--and though I am not a woman, nor did I grow up in an environment that was at all oppressive (thanks, mom and dad!) beyond the general background radiation of our culture, I am queer and a general discontent who grew up in a heterosexist, conformist society, and what this unnamed woman and Russ have to say strikes a strong chord with me. On reading Frankenstein, I can't help but think that we all have Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to thank for this intrinsic subversivity,* indestructible despite the occasional best efforts of macho writers who wished it would go away. It didn't.

*Yes, I know, Firefox's spelling check knows, the dictionary knows that it should be subversiveness, but that word is wicked ugly to me.

Of limited interest, very long, written for my own entertainment; feel free to skip

For reasons unrelated to what I usually write about here, I've been reading a lot of science fiction criticism lately. Some of it has been great (Joanna Russ*), some of it has been entertainingly awful (the dunderheaded blowhard Kingsley Amis**), some of it has been so unrelated to what I'm interested in as to be, through no fault of its own, just kind of dull (Algis Budrys***), and then some of it has just been utterly, unredeemably awful. I give you M. Keith Booker's Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964.

*Whose critical ideas are not quite what I would have expected from reading her fiction, in a fascinating way.
**Who, just as an example, in his New Maps of Hell blithely states as if he were unaware of saying something remotely controversial--or just plain wrong--that H.G. Wells' writing is entirely apolitical!
***Even though his Who? is one of my very favorite novels. His understanding of what he did in that book is very different from mine.

After an absurdly lengthy introduction (taking up well over 15% of the book) that consists of nothing other than a bunch of utterly standard scene-setting about the social milieu of the American 1950s (McCarthyism! Fear! The nuclear family! The Bomb!), material I literally cannot imagine any potential reader of this book being unfamiliar with and to which Booker adds less than nothing, he finally gets around to discussing SF and makes a big hash of it.

He introduces this section on Asimov by asserting that that writer is a "notoriously bad stylist." This is admittedly a very common view among those who don't read much SF (and among those unfortunate SF fans who, I can only surmise, have far too much of that silly literary jealousy that still taints so much of the SF world), but it would be nice if, just once, a critical study that explicitly intends to take the SF of the 50s seriously would dare to, you know, like the SF of the 50s, rather than condescend to it. Booker makes matters worse by saying that Asimov's style and plotting in the Foundation trilogy reveal the work's origins in "fanzine culture." First, it is quite a shock to me to learn that Astounding (now Analog), where all of the stories that ended up being "fixed up" into the trilogy were originally published, and which is one of the best-known, longest lived professional SF magazines, is a "fanzine." This is not an insignificant mistake. For another--again, stop condescending to the field. Though the phenomenon was largely over before I was born, the SF fanzines were to all appearances the home to fantastically brilliant writing far more often than not.

Anyway, after ensuring that no one could think for a moment that he respected the work he's discussing, and after discussing the technology-boosterism of Foundation (which is of course present in the books, though I strongly disagree with Booker's interpretation of it), Booker gives us this, which I am quoting at length from pages 32-33:

A similar pro-technology theme was central to Asimov's robot fiction, including such novels as The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957), which combine science fiction with detective fiction. In such works, Asimov addressed a number of issues related to artificial intelligence long before it became a technological possibility, again ultimately endorsing robots as aids to humanity.

Asimov's famed Laws of Robotics presumably ensured the benevolent nature of his robots, though even he occasionally depicted renegade robots, as in The Caves of Steel. Thus, his robots represented particularly comforting visions of Otherness: easily distinguished from human beings, but entirely pro-human in their behavior. Such useful, but lovable, machines would eventually culminate in the charmingly chubby robot of the Lost in Space television series of the mid-1960s. Other science fiction writers were not necessarily so benevolent, and writers such as Dick, in works such as Dr. Futurity (1960), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and We Can Build You (published in 1972, but written in 1962), would eventually extend the robot theme in the postmodernist direction of android simulacra, indistinguishable from humans by all but specially trained experts. Such creatures, of course, precisely reversed Asimov's assurances, blurring the boundary between the animate and the inanimate and introducing the frightening (especially in the 1950s) possibility that technology might advance to the point where we cannot tell ourselves from our own machines.

On reading this, I feel the urge to congratulate Booker for having read someone else's facile criticism of Asimov, and also to ask him if he's ever read any Asimov.

I have few major objections to the first paragraph, though I would argue that what Asimov "ultimately endorses" in the robot novels is the attitude of making the best you can out of uniformly unbearable options rather than all technology all the time (after all, it is the high technology of industrial civilization that has led Earth to the crisis it finds itself in in the novels), though I freely admit that even Asimov might possibly disagree with me there.

But after that, sheesh. First of all, the Three Laws never "ensured the benevolent behavior" of the robots; from the very beginning the whole point of the robot stories was to find ways that the Three Laws, which were constructed to appear as a foolproof method of ensuring the harmlessness of the robots, could be logically shown to fail. Second, I challenge Booker to find me even one "renegade robot" in Caves. Seriously, just one. Booker first underestimates Asimov by suggesting his portrayal of robots is simple-minded, then underestimates him again by suggesting he cannot even stay mildly consistent to his supposedly simple-minded vision.

Third, the robots have never been uncomplicatedly "comforting"; though Asimov does indeed tend to fall on the side of "it's silly to be afraid of these things," they are always presented as problematic, controversial, and uncanny. On this point Booker is not so much wrong as overly simple-minded, possibly as a result of assuming, as I have mentioned, that his subject is similarly simple-minded.

It continues. The next clause, the "easily distinguished from human beings" one, makes me wonder if he has read either Caves or Sun at all, considering that one of the two main characters in both books is R. Daneel Olivaw, a robot who looks exactly, and acts almost exactly, like a human. And this is not a small point--major plot developments in both novels depend precisely upon most people's inability to distinguish him from a human. To complete Booker's sentence, Olivaw is indeed "entirely pro-human" in his behavior; however, the way in which he is so is, importantly, as perceived from a robot's perspective and, again, far from "comforting."

Suggesting that the Robot from Lost in Space--or anything having to do with that show, for that matter--is a "culmination" of Asimov's work is tantamount to slander, as well as ignoring the obvious fact that that robot is plainly a dumbed-down version of Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet and nothing else.

As far as the comments on Dick go, I would argue that he is, in the end, if anything more "benevolent" than Asimov, but that is a probably contentious opinion, and I suppose I cannot fault Booker for disagreeing. However, the idea that Dick "extended" the idea of robots, while true, is not true in the way Booker suggests, for as I have already mentioned, Asimov's robots are frequently "android simulacra, indistinguishable from humans by all but specially trained experts," which experts as a matter of fact make explicit, pivotal appearances in both Asimov novels under discussion. Again, I can't help but wonder if Booker has even bothered to take the most cursory of peeks at the books he's discussing.

The "observation" of Dick's "blurring the boundary between the animate and the inanimate" where Asimov supposedly failed to gives me the opportunity to point out that, throughout this whole "analysis," Booker misses completely the fact that what Asimov did in his robot stories was to present, and then problematize, the concept of tools that were also characters (without bringing in the complicating issue of real-world slavery, i.e., tools that are also humans, which we can regard as a strength or a weakness as we please), thus enabling him to seamlessly dramatize the traditional SFnal concern with "the idea as hero," as countless commentators have put it. (This concern, incidentally, seems to be one of the things that presents non-SF readers with the most difficulty when approaching SF, and I suspect that that is one of the problems here.*)

*I have a theory, which I can't figure out where to place so it's gonna go here, that the only reason Booker ever thought about SF in the first place was Fredric Jameson's praise of cyberpunk, and now that baby's all grown up and trying to think for himself he doesn't know how to.

Finally, where previous points caused me to wonder if Booker has deigned to glance at Asimov's books, the end of this passage makes me wonder if he's even bothered to read his own book. After listing Dick novels published in 1960, 1968, and 1972, he then discusses their concerns as being particularly topical in the 1950s. Note again the dates of publication of the books listed. Even if we grant Booker the "long fifties" of 1946-1964, which I am eminently willing to do, only one of the three books listed was published in this period. One out of three ain't bad, I guess?

(I need hardly mention that "the frightening...possibility that technology might advance to the point where we cannot tell ourselves from our own machines" is everpresent in Asimov, though from a different point of view than it is present in Dick. Speaking of that difference, throughout what I've written here I have not meant to suggest that there is little difference between Dick and Asimov; the difference is of course huge. It also happens to be completely unrelated to what Booker seems to think it is.)

After I read that section, I decided that this book would not be important to me and that I would just skim through the rest to see if he said anything interesting about other books I was familiar with, upon which I found that Booker, in his slavish devotion to dogmatic, prescriptive, predictive Marxism, thought it was a good idea to analyze the wonderful Clifford D. Simak's beautiful agrarian SF, practically unique in the field, for signs of the author's affiliation as either "left-wing" or "right-wing," inevitably leading to Booker's dismissal of him as "muddled." This to me was the ultimate, unforgivable example of sheer stupidity and voluntary incomprehension (i.e., he's anti-capitalist, but he's not a utopian Marxist, so he must be a stupid mess!), and I decided that no, I was not missing anything by not reading another word.

Blog note; Tiptree-style

Sorry I haven't been posting or responding to comments--I've been engaged in activities other than being on the computer. Largely obsessive reading, but also things that involve not being inside my house, which is nice. But anyway--I'm not ignoring comments (also, if you've e-mailed me and I haven't responded, well, see above), and, oh, Picador in particular, I want to respond to you, and hopefully will at some point during this lifetime--possibly with a whole new post, who knows.

Something that will probably delay that is that the day after tomorrow the Baronette and I are heading off to a lake in the mountains for some water and mountain activities and, we pray, no internet. What I'm looking forward to most is seeing more than four or five stars at night.

Quick response to Justin and ergo's comments on the last post--just as a warning, The Book of the Damned and The Morning of the Magicians can be incredibly goofy reads--and the former can be a bit tiresome, as the vast majority of it is just a litany of what Fort considers evidence, mostly of weird things falling from the sky--but if you read them not as positivist statements of what is, which neither book remotely wants to be, but instead as lengthy, impassioned rants against the tyranny of Occam's razor, then they can be quite valuable, I think.

---------

Another quick thing I wanted to make note of is that I've just started reading James Tiptree, Jr.'s first short story collection, 10,000 Light Years from Home, and so far it is excellent for reasons I'm seriously considering writing a full-length book about (OK, it's not just about her, but I'm completely honestly on the verge of writing a book-length study of science fiction), but one relatively minor stylistic point I've noticed is that it seems that she frequently wants the reader to misread what she's written. Maybe it's just me?

Take for example this exchange, which occurs towards the end of the first story, "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side," much of which has been an extended discussion of sex with aliens and the implications of this (and, satisfyingly to me but not directly relevant to this post, our imperialist urges biting us in the ass), to the irritation of the differently-minded narrator:

"Man is exogamous--all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him; it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That's a drive, y'know, it's built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we've met aliens we can't screw, and we're about to die trying. . . . Do you think I can touch my wife?"

"But--"

"Look. Y'know, if you give a bird a fake egg like its own but bigger and brighter-marked, it'll roll its own egg out of the nest and sit on the fake? That's what we're doing."

"You have a heavy angle on sex." I was trying to conceal my impatience. "Which is great, but the kind of story I'd hoped--"

Now in that last paragraph, is the narrator trying to conceal his impatience or his impotence? He says, Tiptree has him say, impatience, but the context (and subtext) and the shape of the words makes it easy for the reader to switch them.

Then take the third and fourth paragraphs of the next story, "The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone":

The dog-wolf faded off the ridge, reappeared by the bushes where the human crouched. The figure bowed its head; as the wolf came near. Dawn light flickered on his canines. He snapped sideways, carrying away a dark cap.

A flood of light hair spilled out, flew as the human tossed it back. The wolf dropped the cap, sat down and began to worry at something on its chest.

Tiptree describes a wolf approaching a human, makes us linger on it by the odd use of a semicolon in the middle of the action, after which she gives us a closeup of the wolf's teeth. The wolf snaps, carries something away from the human's head--and then the next paragraph gives us something spilling out from that human's head, and a word that looks almost exactly like, but is not, blood.

For the moment, I have nothing to say about that other than that I am impressed. But my god, you should see the heap of notes I've already built up for that book...

Remakes, sequels, canon, supremacy

It always kind of bores me when people complain, as it is so popular to do, about the abundance of remakes and reboots and sequels in movie theaters and on television. Because, you know, the forces behind the movies and tv shows are very nasty capitalists and make their decisions for anything but artistic reasons, let's take that for granted, but at the same time there is nothing either new or intrinsically capitalist about redoing and reworking and reinterpreting works of art. It's just something we do; one word for it is "dialogue."* Complain all you want about the remakes and reboots and sequels not being any good, and I'll agree with you about most (but not all) of them, but then you can say that about just about any movie or tv show or anything, really, so it's not particularly valuable as a critique if you ask me. Complain about how there's more of them now than there used to be and, well, maybe you're right, I haven't done a statistical survey, but on the other hand, try searching IMDB for "Wizard of Oz" and count up the results that come up from before the Judy Garland version, for example.

*Not that "it's always been that way" is a valid defense of anything (see below), but for one thing I wouldn't want art to stop responding to other art, and for another thing the supposed newness of the phenomenon is usually part of the complaint, as in, "today's creative bankruptcy..." etc.

But there's a different issue about the contemporary crop that I've been thinking about recently, and that's the convenient way that it allows for a continuity of white male supremacy in our popular culture. You know, if you're casting a brand-new show about people in space, or even a bridge crew for a new addition to the Star Trek franchise, the wacky kids these days might expect you to throw in non-white, non-male characters in decent proportions. But if you're rebooting KirkandSpock, there will be little objection to there only being two nonwhite characters and only one woman (or to these three tokens being spread miserly across two relatively minor characters), because that's the way it's always been. Not only that, but people will get upset if you try to change anything, because Spock's white! It's canon! I mean, me, I think Spock has been and always shall be Leonard Nimoy, but if you're going to throw an ill-fitting Halloween costume on Zachary Quinto and call it Spock with a straight face, I see no reason why the race and gender of these characters must be eternally fixed. Or my god, you should see, if you haven't, the outrage any time it's suggested that The Doctor could regenerate into something other than a white man, as if race and gender were discrete, unalterable genetic categories for an alien whose entire physical body changes and comes back to life every time he dies. For an even more instructive experience, try googling Idris Elba Thor.

Arrgh

Wonderful!

The first ever direct translation into English of the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem's most famous novel, Solaris, has just been published, removing a raft of unnecessary changes and restoring the text much closer to its original state.

Solaris is one of my favorite novels, despite the fact that the only version of it that I've ever been able to read is a translation of the Polish original by way of a reputedly shitty French translation (why master Lem translator Michael Kandel never got a crack at it, I don't know). So this is exciting news!

But arrgh:

It has just been published as an audiobook download by Audible, narrated by Battlestar Galactica's Alessandro Juliani, with an ebook to follow in six months' time. Lem's heirs are hoping to overcome legal issues to release it as a print edition as well.

I can't do audiobooks (and wouldn't want to hear Alessandro Juliani's smarmy face reading me fucking Solaris anyway), and would either have to sit at my computer or print out a ream of paper to read the damn ebook.

Fuck "legal issues."

In other "I should just learn Polish" news, can someone please just go ahead and translate The Lunar Trilogy into English, for the love of whatever?

Thoughts on We Who Are About To...

Well, it's five and a half weeks later and I'm finally starting my Joanna Russ-a-thon. I decided to start with a re-read, not of The Female Man as I originally planned to do first, but of We Who Are About To..., which I originally said I had read recently but which I realized I actually had read at least four years ago. In my own personal timeline, that's essentially forever. This book needed to be reread.

For those unfamiliar, the concept of the novel is rooted in (but not remotely limited by) a response to two (related) clichés of primarily pre-New Wave science fiction: first, what Kurt Vonnegut (as quoted by Samuel R. Delany in his introduction to my edition) called "the impossibly generous universe," i.e. a fucking spaceship fucking crashes on, out of all the infinite near-emptiness of the universe, a planet that just happens to be inhabitable, and everyone survives to have adventures; and second (and it sure ain't just sci-fi that's guilty of this one), the story (Delany mentions Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations," but there are horrifyingly many others) in which a woman or women must be convinced to sacrifice herself or themselves for the survival of a man or men*. Where these overlap are the dozens and dozens and hundreds of stories about people crashing on an inhabitable planet and, for some hideous reason, finding it essential that they immediately begin to reproduce, populate the planet, conquer it! How the women feel about all this childbirth is, of course, not typically addressed--and when it is, there's usually a lot of simpering and delight and maternal instincts going on.

*Yes, that sentence has five sets of parentheses in it.

So Russ gives us the mixed-gender survivors of a wrecked spaceship. She even concedes to convention and throws them onto an inhabitable--or survivable, at least--planet (though as the narrator likes to point out, there are plenty of places even on friendly old Earth that will kill you in hours or minutes). But what happens there is struggle, not adventure, and when the talk of breeding starts up the already-anxious narrator gets frantic.

The book is sometimes compared to Lord of the Flies (e.g. Delany in his introduction calls it LotF's "guilty conscience" in part for being primarily about adults rather than children), but the comparison strikes me as inaccurate. (Though please note my only experience with Golding's book is of having hated it in 10th grade, so it could be that my memory and understanding of it are skewed*). My understanding of LotF is that the big Theme is that whole stupid thing of the thin veneer of Civilization, that we all are but one step from savagery, etc forever. Not so with Russ. Here, the problem is not the loss of civilization (though that is touched upon with Alan-Bobby's realization that, hey, there are no laws here, and hey, I'm the strongest person around), but rather its retention. The survivors don't waste much time thinking about simple survival before they start thinking about colonization--settling the wilderness, civilizing it and themselves. They get to work building a house (the narrator, sensibly, finds herself a decent cave), they form schedules and arrangements for reproducing ("the great womb robbery"). And more than that: these people, by and large, are not physically suited for this--they have the ailments and weaknesses and allergies that come with civilization and, as the narrator points out, "humanity had not exactly been breeding for survival for the past hundred years." Most telling of all is how quickly the two bureaucrats of the group begin facilitating themselves into leadership.

*And talking about high school English classes reminds me of all those facile constructions they taught us (or me at least)...10th grade was all about "man's inhumanity to man"--"The theme is man's inhumanity to man," my teacher would say almost every day, about every text--and the different types of conflict, "man vs. man" and "man vs. nature" and all those. Woman, of course, is assumed inhuman, to have no conflicts worth mentioning.

When I first read the book, I recognized its brilliance but found it frustrating and impossible (much the same words men have used to describe smart women for time out of mind); I kept wanting to shape its narrator, who I did sympathize with (to a point, oy, not realizing that my sympathy is entirely beside the point), into, and I hate to reveal that I thought this, someone more...rational. Someone more willing to (yeesh) compromise. More than that, I wanted to shape Russ's work into a simpler, more pleasant story of female solidarity. This was what I had expected to encounter, what I was prepared to understand and accept, so when faced with this difficult, bleak story of a difficult, bleak woman in a difficult, bleak situation, my mind rebelled, kept trying to convince me that I was seeing a differently shaped story, kept trying to force Russ into the pattern I wanted for her--my own little bit of patriarchal behavior, there. Feminism's all well and good, dear, but why can't you be nicer?

It actually astonished me how little I had gotten out of the book that first time, relative to what it has to offer--especially considering how much I did manage to get, back then.

I have seen several writers say that We Who Are About To... is about how to die, and how to live, and this is true--very true. But it is just as much about the right to say no--not just in terms of sex, or reproduction, but to anything and everything that you want to say no to, to everything that needs saying no to--or even to things that you just don't feel like saying "yes" to right now, for no good reason. It's about the right to not agree, to walk away from your society, and your culture, and your existence--and about the impossibility of exercising that right even at the most extreme remove imaginable from all these things.

When the other survivors discover that the narrator is a member of a small but well-known and much ridiculed religious group (a syncretic thing we later discover she may have played a part in creating), they taunt her; that and other of her views, such as her Communism, allow the others to safely disregard everything she has to say about their situation. One of the other survivors, the ostentatiously rich Mrs. Graham (who refuses, with the complicity of the others for a time, to acknowledge that she is no longer rich in any meaningful sense), mockingly asks how the narrator can reconcile her religion and her politics. She responds that her religion

"...is no bar to being a Communist. Which I was."

"You're not one any longer?" she said.

"Mrs. Gee," I said, "none of us is anything any longer."

"Frigid little woman," she said, stepping back. I said, "Oh, call me a salad, why don't you, that makes as much sense."

Interestingly, in her narration just two pages earlier, she had referred casually to one of the other women--one who, much later, she will describe as "The only one I liked"--as "frigid."

Towards the end, the narrator--who has (as she says several times, Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you...) by the time of the crash become a lecturer in Renaissance and baroque music--semi-hallucinating, semi-remembering, hears music from everywhere and just throws in this gorgeously accurate description:

And they played and they sang and I wept, everything I ever knew, for Baroque music is keyed into Isaac Newton's kind of time; it's the energy of that new explosion of philosophic time: perspective, mathematics, instant velocity, the great clock, the great wheel, harmonies, the Great Godly Grid.

She goes on to compare music post-Stravinsky to Einstein and relativity, unhappily ("it makes my head ache, referring to things in all dimensions and sometimes backwards"), and it's lovely musicology, but it's also, no matter how much the narrator might not want it to be, a reminder that everything is, in fact, relative, that the music we play and the religion we follow and the way society treats us and the way we treat others are all relative to the assumptions of the prevailing culture, even and especially when that culture goes away, because at this point there's nothing else left to us.

FYI

In case you were wondering, Isaac Asimov:

I thought maybe you could do that with human beings too. You could tell what huge masses of human beings would do, provided they didn't know what the predictions were so they couldn't distort their own behaviour, and provided you had a large enough number, and I felt that with the galactic empire you'd have a large enough number. I don't really believe it's going to work, but it made a good background for the stories, and I was always able to use my "psychohistory" to show how things became inevitable, economically or sociologically and so on. It made for interesting historical novels.....

Not only are there not enough people, but actually their behaviour is far too complicated. They're not like individual molecules. Molecules have limited modes of behaviour and human beings are far less limited, so that human history is more chaotic. In fact, so chaotic that it probably can never be predicted, and in my later Foundation novels I dragged this in. But of course when I first started I didn't know anything about this new theory of chaos.

was much smarter--and vastly more humane--than Paul Krugman:

It is one of the few science fiction series that deals with social scientists—the “psychohistorians,” who use their understanding of the mathematics of society to save civilization as the Galactic Empire collapses. I loved Foundation, and in my early teens my secret fantasy was to become a psychohistorian. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing (yet). I was and am fascinated by history, but the craft of history is far better at the what and the when than the why, and I eventually wanted more. As for social sciences other than economics, I am interested in their subjects but cannot get excited about their methods—the power of economic models to show how plausible assumptions yield surprising conclusions, to distill clear insights from seemingly murky issues, has no counterpart yet in political science or sociology. Someday there will exist a unified social science of the kind that Asimov imagined, but for the time being economics is as close to psychohistory as you can get.

Training starts early

We've been watching a lot of new-millennium Doctor Who recently. Hey, this stuff is pretty frequently brilliant, you know? The Baronette, for reasons of a) employment and b) general good sense has been sticking to just Who proper, while out-of-work, no-sense me has been indulging additionally in the spinoffs--the self-consciously "adult" Torchwood and the for-kids Sarah Jane Adventures (RIP). At this point I've only made it through the first seasons of each, though we're on the third season of for-adults-really-but-kids-have-always-loved-it Who.

Anyway, the Whoniverse as a whole has always been pretty gentle. Torchwood pushes at that quite a bit (and often tries way too hard while it's at it), but there are far worse shows to grow up on than these. It's often violent and kid-scary (and, occasionally, verges on adult-scary), but the Doctor makes a point of never carrying weapons, and he respects life unless it unacceptably threatens other life, and occasionally drops some nice slogans.* And the whole thing has been pretty remarkably good in terms of women (regularly creating strong female characters who can think, frequently passing the Bechdel test without cheating, etc.), and race (though there are some slightly troubling patterns with its black characters, overall it's not too shabby--and it has a lot of them, relatively), and sexuality. In general, it is very seldom that I cringe while watching it, and when I do it's usually fairly minor things. Much better than you might expect from state TV**, in other words.

*Dalek Emperor: "What are you, Doctor? Killer or coward?"
The Doctor: "Coward. Every time."
That episode also contains the amazing line "You are tiny. I can see the whole of time and space, every single atom of your existence, and I divide them." Delivered brilliantly by the brilliant Billie Piper as the brilliant Rose Tyler.
**And there's a pair of words to chill the blood, am I right?

All of which makes it all the more...weird, when something goes icky. Like in the Torchwood episode where some startlingly vehement, and yet disturbingly casual, transphobia was put into the mouth of, of all characters, Captain Jack, the pansexual anything-goes-including-aliens open-minded man of the 51st century (though apparently I was the only person in the world bothered by that line--and no, I'm not linking to that After Elton post because I like it, but only because it starts with the quote I'm talking about).

Or like in the Sarah Jane Adventures episode I watched this morning that suddenly spewed out a prison rape joke:



It's the kind of thing that should be unbelievable. Sarah Jane is one of the gentlest characters in the entire gentle world of Doctor Who. It's in the middle of an episode with a decent, if a bit ham-handed, message about how awful it is to train young children for violence. And yet right here in the middle of this show for children, the threat of imprisonment and violence is treated lightly, as if it were funny. Unfortunately, it's not unbelievable. Because, you see, we all have to be trained from a very young age to lack all empathy, to separate humanity into good and bad, and to think that punishing the bad part is not only acceptable, but good, and not only good, but funny. What better way than by casually sticking this kind of thing into a show purportedly against violence?

I'm not saying that the episode's writer, Phil Gladwin, plotted and schemed his way to to sticking this line in. But as far as I can tell there's only two kinds of minds that could think a line like that is appropriate in any context, or, for the love of god, necessary in a fucking children's show*. The first is the kind that does have a deliberate interest in training empathy out of children so as to maintain the status quo. The second is the kind that has been so socialized that it does this unconsciously. In some ways it's almost worse that Gladwin is far more likely to be the second kind. It's in this way that this murderous culture of ours maintains itself.

*And I am most emphatically not one to be all "but think of the children." I think children can be trusted to handle far more than we usually let them. And I don't think they should be protected from information and knowledge about either sex or violence, since those are both integral parts of the reality they live in (one a much much better part than the other, of course). But it's exactly these kinds of messages that slip past the conscious level and become a sort of background radiation of what-we-think-is-acceptable, until it gets to the point where we have a whole society of what used to be human beings who can't be bothered to stop laughing uproariously at goddamn prison rape, let alone do anything to stop it.

A year and a half before that episode originally aired, there had apparently been a minor controversy about a Who episode that had a brief, throwaway, fairly subtle joke about oral sex between consenting adults. To my knowledge (and to google's, as far as I can tell), there was no such outcry about this.

To anyone who doesn't understand, or doesn't believe in, the concept of the rape culture: voilà.

RIP Joanna Russ

I've only read two of her books--The Female Man, years ago, and We Who Are About To... more recently--but the impact they had on me was enormous. I've been meaning to read more for the longest time, and now I will. I think I'll start with a re-read of The Female Man, though--much as I loved it, and much as it changed me for the better, I don't think I was prepared then to receive all it had to give.

She was everything science fiction should be and very rarely is: experimental both in style and content, feminist, vicious, sure as hell not techno-utopian*. She recognized that "lowbrow" writing is as important as any other kind--she wrote essays on Kirk/Spock slash fiction** and if I'm not mistaken actually gave "slash" its name--but refused, as so many who share in that recognition end up doing, to infantilize that writing or to be infantilized by it herself.

*Though I may have a post in me at some point about how even the classic sci-fi writers with the worst techno-utopian reputations weren't quite so simple.
**Here the often-problematic Teresa Nielsen Hayden unproblematically and charmingly remembers Russ's interest in these things, mentioning her observation that, in some contexts, "Spock is a woman." I've long wanted to write an essay about that very thing (in contexts other than slash, which I have no knowledge of or interest in beyond the most glancing "huh" reaction), but hesitated because a) I'm not a woman myself, and b) I don't write cultural criticism essays often, though I frequently want to.

She didn't write much the last few decades of her life, due, I'm given to understand, to crippling pain resulting from a back injury. Awful. I had heard some vague rumblings in recent years that she was starting to write again, and I had always had it in the back of my head that some new late-period Joanna Russ was coming, was to be looked forward to. As with any highly brilliant, highly experimental artist, I was excited to see what later works would be like--you never know how people as singular as her will change with time. Now, who knows if there will ever be anything else from her--I tend to doubt it. Still, she has so much already on offer that I have no experience of--I've barely touched her fiction, and her essays not at all.

Still, for someone I have so little genuine knowledge of, I had quite a shock when the "Joanna Russ, 1937-2011" headlines started showing up in my reader after her death Friday. She was important, and she was wonderful.

Clifford D. Simak, A Choice of Gods

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

The ability seems to be inherent. Man probably had it for a long time before he began to use it. For it to develop time was needed and the longer life gave us time. Perhaps it would have developed even without the longer life if we'd not been so concerned, so fouled up, with our technology. Somewhere we may have taken the wrong turning, accepted the wrong values and permitted our concern with technology to mask our real and valid purpose. The concern with technology may have kept us from knowing what we had. These abilities of ours could not struggle up into our consciousness through the thick layers of machines and cost estimates and all the rest of it. And when we talk about abilities, it's not simply going to the stars.
page 20

"I don't know why," said Jason, "but when you talk about the People I have the feeling that you are describing a monstrous alien race rather than humanity. Without knowing any of the details, they sound frightening."

"They are to me," said John. "Not perhaps because of any single facet of their culture, for some of these facets can be very pleasant, but because of a sense of the irresistible arrogance implicit in it. Not the power so much, although the power is there, but the naked arrogance of a species that sees everything as property to be manipulated and used."
page 77

And what had she done, she wondered. What had happened to her? Trying to recall it, she could discover only fragments of it and she was sure that when it had happened there had been no fragmentation and that the fragments she could recall were no more than broken pieces of the whole. The world had opened out and so had the universe, or what she since had thought must have been the universe, lying all spread out before her, with every nook revealed, with all the knowledge, all the reasons there--a universe in which time and space had been ruled out because time and space were only put there, in the first place, to make it impossible for anyone to grasp the universe.
page 138

Philip K. Dick, "Man, Android, and Machine" in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (Lawrence Sutin, ed.), several excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

Within the universe there exists fierce cold things, which I have given the name "machines" to. Their behavior frightens me, especially when it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them "androids," which is my own way of using that word. By "android" I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being... I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory--that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities that smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.
page 211

"Man" or "human being" are terms that we must understand correctly and apply, but they apply not to origin or to any ontology but to a way of being in the world; if a mechanical construct halts in its customary operation to lend you assistance, then you will posit to it, gratefully, a humanity that no analysis of its transistors and relay systems can elucidate. A scientist, tracing the wiring circuits of that machine to locate its humanness, would be like our own earnest scientists who tried in vain to locate the soul in man, and, not being able to find a specific organ located at a specific spot, opted to decline to admit that we have souls. As soul is to man, man is to machine: It is the added dimension in terms of functional hierarchy. As one of us acts godlike (gives his cloak to a stranger), a machine acts human when it pauses in its programmed cycle to defer to it by reason of a decision.
page 212

My theme for years in my writing has been, "The devil has a metal face." Perhaps this should be amended now. What I glimpsed and then wrote about was in fact not a face; it was a mask over a face. And the true face is the reverse of the mask. Of course it would be. You do not place fierce, cold metal over fierce, cold metal. You place it over soft flesh, as the harmless moth adorns itself artfully to terrorize others with ocelli.
page 213

Probably everything in the universe serves a good end--I mean, serves the universe's goals. But intrinsic portions or subsystems can be takers of life. We must deal with them as such, without reference to their role in the total structure.
page 214

Philip K. Dick, "The Android and the Human" in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (Lawrence Sutin, ed.), several excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

Speaking in science fiction terms, I now foresee an anarchistic, totalitarian state ahead. Ten years from now a TV street reporter will ask some kid who is president of the United States, and the kid will admit that he doesn't know. "But the president can have you executed," the reporter will protest. "Or beaten or thrown into prison or all your rights taken away, all your property--everything." And the boy will reply, "Yeah, so could my father up to last month when he had his fatal coronary. He used to say the same thing." End of interview. And when the reporter goes to gather up his equipment he will find that one of his color 3-D stereo microphone-vidlens systems is missing; the kid has swiped it from him while the reporter was babbling on.

If, at it seems we are, [sic] in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, human individual would be: Cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities. If the television screen is going to watch you, rewire it late at night when you're permitted to turn it off--rewire it in such a way that the police flunky monitoring the transmission from your living room mirrors back his house. When you sign a confession under duress, forge the name of one of the political spies who's infiltrated your model-airplane club. Pay your fines in counterfeit money or rubber checks or stolen credit cards. Give a false address. Arrive at the courthouse in a stolen car. Tell the judge that if he sentences you, you will substitute aspirin tablets for his daughter's birth control pills. Or put His Honor on a mailing list for pornographic magazines. Or, if all else fails, threaten him with your using his telephone-credit-card number to make unnecessary long-distance calls to cities on another planet. It will not be necessary to blow up the courthouse anymore. Simply find some way to defame the judge--you saw him driving home one night on the wrong side of the road with his headlights off and a fifth of Seagram's VO propped up against his steering wheel. And his bumper sticker that night read: Grant Full Rights to Us Homosexuals. He has, of course, torn off the sticker by now, but both you and ten of your friends witnessed it. And they are all at pay phones right now, ready to phone the news to the local papers. And, if he is so foolish as to sentence you, at least ask him to give back the little tape recorder you inadvertently left in his bedroom. Since the off-switch on it is broken, it has probably recorded its entire ten-day reel of tape by now. Results should be interesting. And if he tries to destroy the tape, you will have him arrested for vandalism, which in the totalitarian state of tomorrow will be the supreme crime. What is your life worth in his eyes compared with a $3 reel of Mylar tape? The tape is probably government property, like everything else, so to destroy it would be a crime against the state. The first step in a calculated, sinister insurrection.
pages 194-5

Sudden surprises, by the way--and this thought may be in itself a sudden surprise to you--are a sort of antidote to the paranoid . . . or, to be accurate about it, to live in such a way as to encounter sudden surprises quite often or even now and then as an indication that you are not paranoid, because to the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so. It all fits into his system. For us, though, there can be no system; maybe all systems--that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about--are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving--total so-called inanimate environment, in other words very much like a person, like the behavior of one intricate, subtle, half-veiled, deep, perplexing, and much-to-be-loved human being to another. To be feared a little, too, sometimes. And perpetually misunderstood. About which we can neither know nor be sure; and we must only trust and make guesses toward.
page 208

[N]o android would think to do what a bright-eyed little girl I know did, something a little bizarre, certainly ethically questionable in several ways, at least in any traditional sense, but to me fully human in that it shows, to me, a spirit of merry defiance, of spirited, although not spiritual, bravery and uniqueness:

One day while driving along in her car she found herself following a truck carrying cases of Coca-Cola bottles, case after case, stacks of them. And when the truck parked, she parked behind it and loaded the back of her own car with cases, as many cases, of bottles of Coca-Cola as she could get in. So, for weeks afterward, she and her friends had all the Coca-Cola they could drink, free--and then, when the bottles were empty, she carried them to the store and turned them in for the deposit refund.

To that, I say this: God bless her. May she live forever. And the Coca-Cola company and the phone company and all the rest of it, with their passive infrared scanners and sniperscopes and suchlike--may they be gone long ago. Metal and stone and wire and thread never did live. But she and her friends--they, our human future, are our little song.
pages 209-10

Stanislaw Lem, "Non Serviam" in A Perfect Vacuum page 172

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

A man may interpret the real world in a variety of ways. He may devote particular attention--intense scientific investigation--to certain facets of that world, and the knowledge he acquires then casts its own special light on the remaining portions of the world, those not considered in his priority-setting research. If first he diligently takes up mechanics, he will fashion for himself a mechanical model of the world and will see the Universe as a gigantic and perfect clock that in its inexorable movement proceeds from the past to a precisely determined future. This model is not an accurate representation of reality, and yet one can make use of it for a period of time historically long, and with it can even achieve many practical successes--the building of machines, implements, etc.

With apologies to What The Tee Vee Taught...

...I don't want to encroach on your territory, but I figured Australia was out of your jurisdiction.



AS IF the full array of standard gay stereotypes weren't ridiculous enough (the "normal guy," the leather daddy, the bear, and the prissy twink, from left to right*), you're really going to shove disability, non-whiteness, slight fatness**, and femaleness onto one token character? This is hilarious. I wonder how many board meetings and focus groups went into constructing that set of characters.

(It is, by the way, a promo from an upcoming Australian sitcom about gay sci-fi nerds. As seen on io9.)

*Because it's certainly been my experience that every group of gay men includes one representative of each of these types.
**The bear doesn't count.

Just a quick bit of trivia

More substantial posting tomorrow, probably.

A couple weeks ago the stupid gawker sci-fi blog io9 that I read despite how dumb it is posted an interview with Steve Vogt, the astronomer whose team discovered that awesomely earth-like planet 20 light years away. He insists that this planet must have life on it, which is fairly unscientific of him but I tend to agree, because I love the idea of life on other planets, no matter what, and because it just seems so probable to me; after all, we have pretty decent suggestions of life, past or present, occurring on a pretty large number of bodies just in our solar system alone, so this rocky planet right in the "habitable" zone of its star seems like a good candidate, you know?

Anyway, Vogt was talking about his reasons for being so sure that there's life on this planet, and he described things in a way that had never really presented itself to me before, and I liked it, so here it is:

[T]he universe is a vast place and most of it is totally unavailable for life as we know it. There are two things in the universe you can't get around: Temperature and gravity. So if you are in interstellar space you're at 2.7 degrees kelvin. Your atoms are hardly vibrating and you're not going to be alive. Life as we know it can't survive. So you have to be near a star. That's good, but stars have gravity and you can fall into them. Your only hope is to be near a star but not falling into it – you need an orbit. And that's magical. That's where you can have enough warmth, but not turn into a cloud of plasma because you've fallen into the star. So when you have a planet in orbit and it's the right size and in the right orbit [like Zarmina], it's a very special place. There are many planets like that but we didn't know that [until our discovery].

William Gibson, Spook Country, several excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

You are, she told herself, crazy. But that seemed for the moment abundantly okay, even though she knew that this was not a salubrious stretch for any woman, particularly alone. Nor for any pedestrian, this time of the morning. Yet this weather, this moment of anomalous L.A. climate, seemed to have swept any usual sense of threat aside. The street was as empty as that moment in the film just prior to Godzilla's first footfall.
-page 4

...Bobby was himself a musician, though not in the old plays-a-physical-instrument-and/or-sings modality. He took things apart, sampled them, mashed them up. This was fine with her, though like General Bosquet watching the charge of the Light Brigade, she was inclined to think it wasn't war. Inchmale understood it, though, and indeed had championed it, as soon as it was digitally possible pulling guitar lines out of obscure garage chestnuts and stretching them, like a mad jeweler elongating sturdy Victorian tableware into something insectile, post-functionally fragile, and neurologically dangerous.
-page 71

She afforded herself a quick scan of the rest of the clientele. Were a cruise missile just then to impact the corrugated roof of Skybar, she decided, there would be no great need for People to change its next cover.
-page 83

Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, page 594 (in omnibus edition)

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among is current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-three thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.

"In other words--and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded--their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."